


Close to the Sun in Lonely Lands

by Amberdreams, De_Nugis



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-29
Updated: 2014-01-29
Packaged: 2018-01-10 12:18:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,496
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1159663
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amberdreams/pseuds/Amberdreams, https://archiveofourown.org/users/De_Nugis/pseuds/De_Nugis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When he’d felt the cool touch of the knife just before Dean had cut his throat he’d known it for what it was, not the last mercy but the first step.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Close to the Sun in Lonely Lands

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Supernatural Reversebang 2013 challenge. 
> 
> Art by Amberdreams, Fic by De_Nugis.
> 
> Thanks to Monicawoe for the beta.
> 
> see notes at end for elucidation of warning stuff

[](http://photobucket.com/)

 

The thing Sam doesn’t know, the thing Dean’s never going to tell him, is how long he’d had the spell ready. This wasn’t some half-assed last minute research. This wasn’t a Hail Mary. Not that any Mary would give it her blessing. Fact was, if Dean had gone on relying on what he could do on a wing and a prayer in a crisis, then sooner or later Dean was going to lose. And Dean wasn’t losing this one.

Dean had started looking as soon as Sam booted the angel out. Well, maybe a day or two after. There had been stuff going on, after all. And then he’d been back with Sam and obviously this wasn’t a thing he could work on in front of Sam. Though Sam had been mostly pissed and not talking to Dean, so Dean had a lot of free time. He hadn’t slacked off, though, even when things got better, mending fences. He’d apologize till he was blue in the face if that was what Sam wanted, work as hard as Sam needed him to, to earn back Sam’s trust. But he wasn’t going to stop looking for ways to betray him, next time he had to. It’s what Winchesters do.

When Sam had died, Dean had been ready.

[](http://s1362.photobucket.com/user/Aethelflaede/media/reversebanging/lonewalker1_zps1a1ce278.jpg.html)

 

The first time – well, no, not by a long shot, no virgins here, but the first of the times measured in wingbeats and growth rings, in Dean’s long journeys and returns – there had been pain. Worse than being stabbed, worse than the Trials or a gunshot wound. Not worse than Lucifer, but more vividly _now_. What happens in the Cage stays in the Cage, which includes a good part of Sam, but that’s a fair price to pay, it always was. Sam has certainly never been tempted to send Death or leprechauns or Cas or Dean chasing the bits that are still there. Let them go. Let them scatter. They’re almost carefree, not enough of him to register, so Sam doesn’t have to lock them down.

Anyway. Sam’s thoughts tend to get scattered at first, finding themselves back in grey matter under friable skull, carried about by an awkward, rootless, wingless creature. So, yes, that first time had been bad. Disemboweling is a bad way to go. He’d been screaming, Dean had been screaming. A real fucking mess. And smelly, god. No one goes out with pleasant memories, but the smell of one’s own spilt guts is a bad last impression, to those who get standards of comparison. Doctors, Sam supposes, back when there were doctors. And soldiers back when there were soldiers. And Winchesters. There still are Winchesters.

Still, he’d managed to say “Don’t bring me back,” quite clearly. And Dean had heard him. Heard and promised. Neither of them believed it. It was more a formality than anything. When he’d felt the cool touch of the knife just before Dean had cut his throat he’d known it for what it was, not the last mercy but the first step. He hadn’t been surprised to taste the blood dripping from Dean’s knife into his mouth. He hadn’t been surprised to find himself back. It had seemed inevitable.

Granted, he’d been a little surprised to find he was both a tree and a bird. That had taken some getting used to.

There’s no time to process anything as a hawk – it’s an eternity, but a swift one, lived on the dive and in flesh still hot with blood. But the juniper had worked through it, slow root tendrils sifting through sand grains, one at a time. He’d had time and roots at last. He was safe. Dean wanted him safe. Funny. He’d asked Dean for that, in the beginning. Dean had forced it on him in the end.

At least they agree on something. For a while he’d thought maybe Dean, or the spell, let him have some choice in the form that this takes, that maybe he chose roots and freedom, because he’s never been good at getting either, let alone both. But maybe Dean chose that for him, too. Still, even trapped, he’s finally gotten away. Dean can’t catch the hawk. He can’t get under the tree’s bark, into the solid core, the growth rings Sam has begun to accumulate, a slow expansion that leaves no dangerous empty places. Dean has Sam with him forever, but Sam has an out of sorts, a perpetual escape.

And it hadn’t ever hurt again. It hadn’t hurt Sam, at least. Dean has to slit his throat every time (where the fuck did he get this ritual, anyway, Sam wonders in those last few seconds, because it always takes forever for consciousness to blink out with the draining blood and wake up in wing and wood, where the hell did Dean find it, some stupid fertility rite or something, probably, Sam hopes he’s not going to find himself pregnant one day in tree form, like Myrrha in Ovid, or lay an egg, if it’s the hawk, now there’s a thought, and it’s not like Sam doesn’t have cause to know that Dean doesn’t think these things through), and that fucks with Dean, Sam can see it. That’s what drives Dean to walk decades into the distance, that, more than hunting meat and demons for the hawk, more than going back to the bunker, more than something to do.

Sam’s lonely sometimes, rustling his needles in the hot silence when Dean is gone. The hawk keeps Dean in sight, but it feels cold and separate, impossibly high in the distant skies. But Sam understands why Dean travels.

[](http://s1362.photobucket.com/user/Aethelflaede/media/reversebanging/HawkSam_zps5b1dd7ef.jpg.html)

 

Dean is a long way away.

He tears strips of a demon’s flesh with Ruby’s knife and feeds them to the hawk and its eyes glow yellow. It doesn’t bother Dean. The hawk’s Sam, but it doesn’t look like Sam. It’s not supposed to be human.

Dean is only asking one thing. The whole fucking world gone to ruin, and Dean hasn’t asked any angel or demon or god to save it. He’s only asked for one thing. His heartbeat drums it, even when he’s asleep, the hawk on a low branch beside him, grey membrane veiling its eyes. One thing, one thing, one thing.

If he dies, Sam dies. If he’s not there to kill him again, when the time comes, Sam will die. So Dean will live. It’s not that hard, not once he’s made up his mind. It's even indexed, "immortality," in the damn card catalogue. There are plenty of myths, plenty of ways, and he has the world at his disposal. He decides on the apples of the Hesperides because he likes the Greek stuff, because he gets to fight a snake, because it turns out they’re off the coast of fucking Florida. He gathers the apples while the serpent screams, bloody muck running down from its blinded eyes, the hawk already a small point in the hot dazzle of sky, blood and eye jelly on its talons. Later it will sit on a branch and pick them meticulously clean. The juniper is messy, dropping twigs and berries and tiny cones. The hawk got Sam’s neat freak part. 

The apples aren’t bad. In a human moment Dean wonders if he could make pie out of them. Winchester’s Post-Apocalyptic Apples of the Hesperides Bakery. 

When he makes it back he leans against Sam’s trunk and outlines his pie idea and imagines that the faint hiss of wind in the branches is Sam laughing.

He talks to the hawk a lot. Hell, he talks to the _tree_ a lot. It’s not like there’s anyone else to talk to. He’d talked to Sam’s dead body, after all. Talking to Sam alive makes more sense than that. And Sam’s alive, now. Sam’s staying alive. Dean has seen to that.

It’s a pity Sam can’t talk back, though. Dean can’t even really imagine sarcasm in the fierce reflective eye or the turn of the hawk’s head. Weird, the tree’s more Sam, really. Dean can feel a great, patient exasperation stretching across the sand towards him like its shadow, every time he approaches it. And its hair is a mess. 

When Sam wakes up next time Dean will tell him that.

[](http://s1362.photobucket.com/user/Aethelflaede/media/reversebanging/juniper_zps63765202.jpg.html)

 

No, the dying part never hurts any more.

Of course, when he wakes up – three days, Dean had said the first time, we’ve got three days, and then he’d gone sullen and shifty, and it wasn’t till the third time that Sam had nagged it out of him: three days every hundred years. Sam’s a fucking immortal hawk and a juniper tree, and he’s skipping centuries, three fucking days as a human in each one. _Your goddamn stunt_ , he’d called it to Dean. Sam still thinks, maybe two hundred years later, maybe three, that that had been his masterpiece of understatement. Anyway, when he wakes up it’s uncomfortable.

He falls onto the sand. It’s the fifth time. Or maybe the sixth.

Sam lies there for a while. His vision is shut in, claustrophobic, distances gone. He can’t breathe. Maybe because he’s coughing, small, brown, scaled needles and dust and sand. He sits up and clutches the ground, fingers driving into the rock, but his roots are gone. There’s only one of him, and the world is askew on the single vision.

“Sam?” 

Dean is a blurred shadow.

“Don’t fucking make gin out of me,” says Sam. He always has a first line pent up. Years (he thinks, two systems of time, neither works very well, neither has a calendar), years he’s been waiting to say that. Dean had spent a lot of time expounding that particular plan, after he’d finally let go of the oh-so-hilarious Apples of the Hesperides bakery thing. Gin-making, the still he’ll build, back at the bunker, how there were probably books, all the info he needs, those Men of Letters knew how to live, and finally, Sammy, finally you’re make yourself useful with something, even if it’s fucking berries.

Dean laughs, flips Sam over in the sand. Sand gets in Sam’s hair. He has hair. 

“You’d make lousy gin anyway,” Dean says. “Bitter, whiny gin. The drink of self-pity.”

“Oh, you’re one to talk,” says Sam. He doesn’t even know what he means. He wakes up contrary. It makes so much less sense like this, his human brain throwing some weird kind of tantrum. It feels testing and familiar. He’ll take it, and the glow of real anger that seizes him for a moment, that lets him wrestle Dean onto his back and glare down at him, not that that wipes the grin off Dean’s face.

“Don’t fuck with me, Dean. I mean it.” 

“Or you’ll stop with the berries? Fine. If you’re making such a fuss about it, fine. No gin. Promise.” 

The familiar belligerent concession, the pleading accusation, almost knocks Sam on his ass with _Dean_. Dean’s lying, of course. If he takes it into his head to start some kind of Sam-still he’ll do it, even when there’s no one on earth but the stray demon left to drink gin. Dean is Dean. It’s what Sam comes back for. It was what he was running away from. Now if he could make _those_ two impulses into different lifeforms – maybe with a hemisphere or so between them – Sam would be a lot happier. Except right now he wants to pull them together, pull them into himself, hold on. He wants to hold onto the sun on the back of his neck, to Dean’s crazy, annoying grin and his heart beating under Sam’s hand.

“You never drank gin anyway,” says Sam.

That’s how it goes. Every century they talk for three days, and that’s how it goes. 

[](http://s1362.photobucket.com/user/Aethelflaede/media/reversebanging/deanstandingwithknife_zpsb3acfb4e.jpg.html)

 

Dean doesn’t make gin. He thinks about it. He hunts down the books, figures out how it could work. He even sketches a label, with a flattering portrait of Sam. Person-Sam, not tree-Sam. He shows it to the little bowl of dried, pungent berries he keeps on the library table, because they’re comforting, because they smell faintly of Sam. They don’t react. He holds it up to the hawk’s eye, but it can’t really see things close up. It doesn’t react, either. But Dean doesn’t build the still. He promised Sam he wouldn’t, after all. Dean makes a lot of promises. He tries to keep the small ones, the ones he can. 

 

It feels like the sun gets older in the sky. Of course that’s nonsense. Even this stretched time isn’t astronomical. But the climate has changed so much. Maybe it’s dust in the air. The sun seems old, and it feels colder.

Sam falls onto the sand. He’s waking up for the ninth time, in the desert in what was Arizona a very long time ago.

He’s tired. 

The small dried fingers of juniper he brushes from his clothing look thin and tattered. It’s early afternoon, the shadow of the rocks just starting to stretch eastward.

Dean isn’t there.

For a moment Sam’s stomach drops with absolute fear, even though he could see Dean just moments ago, through the hawk’s fierce vision, trudging across the sand not far away. But something could happen. 

Probably not this time. Something could happen, but there’s no reason it should be now, not any other time in the last millennium, or the next. Sam leans against the rock, breathing deliberately with deep, human lungs. He hopes he won’t die here. Thirst would be unpleasant. There would be delirium, like during the Trials, like when Lucifer was buzzing around in Sam’s head like a gnat. (So long ago now – absurd how long a couple of centuries seemed to him back then. Dean’s right, he does make a fuss.) And it’s not like he could count on Dean not to bring him back.

Of course, he could take his chance. He could run. He could run away. Used to be his specialty, way back when. The tree can’t run and that’s convenient for Dean, but Sam has legs for now. He could run away and maybe Dean wouldn’t find him, at least not in time. He could lie in the desert somewhere and rest. Though he would have left tracks in the sand. He could rest in the desert, but Dean, Dean will come with a knife and cut his throat, cut his throat and drip blood in his mouth, walk away with a hawk on his shoulder. Roots will strike into the sand. Again and again. 

If he stays Dean will come. Soon. Later this afternoon, tonight, or maybe tomorrow, maybe it will only be two days this time. But they’ll talk. An old joke, the taste of beer. Dean never brings him the apples. They’d be redundant, for Sam. Anyway, Dean must be sick of the things. Dean will be here and Dean will still be human, that miraculous thing, that thing Sam could never achieve. All Dean requires of Sam is that Sam live. That Sam give up his death. There’s always sacrifice. It’s not like Sam has any other definitions of love. This might as well be it.

Dean shows up four hours later, by the sun.

“Aren’t you, like, the _de facto_ ruler of the world?” Sam asks him. “Can’t you make the damn trains run on time?”

“There aren’t any trains,” says Dean. “I have to walk, you know. There and back. Uphill both ways.” 

He’d gripped Sam so tight when he’d finally arrived that Sam thinks he has bruises on his shoulders in the shape of Dean’s fingers, a handprint as clear as the one Dean used to have from Cas. The bruises hurt where the rock presses into them.

“In the snow,” Sam supplies. It feels colder every time he wakes up, but he hasn’t seen snow here, not in nine hundred years. Or twenty-four days, whichever you want to count. The hawk sees snow sometimes, a glistening slide of sun, an exhilarating blankness.

“That’s right,” says Dean. He takes a beer out of his pack and hands it to Sam. Sam holds it for a moment, weighing the worn, cloudy bottle in his hands. Dean has spent stubborn decades, Sam knows, reading books, finding barley, hops, improvising (Dean was always good with his hands, with machines), reinventing this small corner of human civilization so that every century he can bring Sam beer. It’s an impossible gesture, annihilating. And it’s not gin. The sun stings in Sam’s eyes. He twists off the top (how the fuck does Dean manage the tops?) and takes a sip. 

“Still, fact is, you’re four hours late with my beer,” he says to Dean. “I’m thinking I’ll take my revenge. You’d better watch out.”

“What’re you going to do, rustle at me?” says Dean.

“I could fall on you. Or no. Why let you take me with you? I could drop a branch on your head.”

“Fighting words, Sammy. I am not afraid to prune. Any more disrespect out of you and you’re topiary.”

“What you’re forgetting,” says Sam, when he’s wrestled Dean onto a pile of his old needles (they always end up wrestling, Sam needs it, needs to feel his living muscle and Dean’s thrumming blood and the worn, ritual surge of anger), “what you’re forgetting is, it’s not just the tree. I’ve got hawk powers. I could poop on your head.” The hawk can’t hold thoughts like the tree does, but maybe, if Sam concentrated, maybe he could get it to poop on Dean’s head.

“Now that’s just gross,” says Dean. 

They lie there for a while. The stars are coming out. Sam watches them. 

There aren’t any other human beings on earth. Sam has grasped that, intellectually. He’s seen it, circling and surveying with the eye of the hawk. Earth belongs to animals and a few demons now. And Dean. And angels, if they ever come back. But Sam doesn’t _know_ it, not really. Lying here on sand and needles, talking shit with his brother, it doesn’t feel gone. It feels like there are diners and motels and victims and witnesses, like Jody is going to call them with some freaky deaths or Kevin is going to walk in hungover, muttering about cuneiform. Like the car’s parked somewhere just behind the rocks.

Dean knows it. Dean has watched Earth die. 

Sam doesn’t know how Dean does it, he really doesn’t. Sam’s life is sun and endurance and the taste of sand and blood. It’s only these three days he has to be human. Prickly sand under one shoulder, Dean’s muscle and bone under the other. For him this is the world. This, not that global wilderness.

“Why this?” he asks. “I mean, why a hawk and a juniper, specifically? Why not, like, a robin and a maple?” Sam could have spent eternity in Canada. Dean could have made tedious jokes about syrup. “What did you do?” 

The accusation of it wore out long ago, in the times he didn’t ask. Now he’s just curious. Maybe that’s why he can finally say it.

Dean shrugs the shoulder Sam’s leaning on.

“I improvised a bit,” he says. Great. Sam’s probably lucky he’s not an elephant and a forest of kelp in the mid-Atlantic. “But it’s about vision. Hawks because eyesight. Juniper because they burned it to see, see the future, I guess. It’s not supposed to be a resurrection spell, really.” He stalls there but Sam figured that one out long ago. The throat-cutting was a clue. Dean adapted a human sacrifice.

Even after nine hundred years Sam’s guessing Dean still hasn’t figured out the irony there.

“But what was it meant to do?” Sam says.

“Make a guardian,” says Dean. “Not that there’s much left to fucking guard.”

Maybe Dean’s not the only one with unappreciated ironies. Saving the world hadn’t been much use even before Sam got stuck to watch over it like a fucking scarecrow. For a moment it swoops in on him like a hawk, shadows him like a tree: vision. A panoramic wasteland of years, a future in which the sun really will grow old. He can see it. A time when he and Dean will forget each other, when they won’t remember even when they’re like this, pressed shoulder to shoulder.

“Is there a way to break it?” Sam asks, but that’s going a risk too far. Dean doesn’t answer.

Maybe Sam doesn’t want to know.

Just after the third noon Dean steps behind him like he always does. Sam waits for the cool press of the knife on his throat, for the last taste of blood.

[](http://s1362.photobucket.com/user/Aethelflaede/media/reversebanging/Samdead1_zps25ea1a5f.jpg.html)

 

Sam was bound to ask one day. 

Because Sammy wants it, because Dean’s bored in the endless days with the quiet hum of the bunker’s inexplicable, eternal climate control, because one day the angels will end their Time Out and Sam will ask Cas and maybe Cas will know how to break it, because the hawk is watching from its corner (Dean had found some books on falconry deep in the stacks in the first hundred years, but Sam never was trainable, any Sam, and anyway Dean’s gone off meat since the first time he watched the hawk eat a rabbit, a falcon’s not much use to him except with the snake and the demons), watching with its fearless, incurious eye, Dean does some research.

Dean’s always prepared. Even though he’s not planning to use it.

 

“I want out,” Sam says, next time he tumbles into a human body on the sand. The tenth time. Dean is there.

Dean looks at him, patient and unbudging. 

“You always want out,” he says. “But there isn’t any, Sam. There is no out. Even if we break this thing, there’s nowhere to go. I know cause I’ve been there.”

“Oz,” says Sam. It’s the first thing that comes to his head, but it’s a good idea. “No reason the gate should stop working, is there? Maybe Charlie’s still there. I want out. Let’s run off to Oz.”

“Charlie’s been dead for a thousand years, Sam,” says Dean flatly, “give or take.” 

“Maybe not,” says Sam. “For all we know time doesn’t run the same there. Like Narnia.” Or hell. “Maybe there are other places we could get to. Look, the bunker kept running, right? All this and it went right on. It’s nothing on earth. It’s not hell or heaven or purgatory. So it’s something else. Faerie, maybe. This, this life, Dean. This isn’t good for you.”

Dean’s clothes look like they always have. He’s not too thin. His eyes are reddened with the sun, but he looks better than he did a thousand years ago after Dad died, better than he did when Sam was seeing Lucifer and Dean was seeing nothing but the bottom of a bottle. Better than he did in all those messes, back when Sam could die. But there’s something wrong. There’s everything wrong. There’s something gone in Dean, and Sam doesn’t need a hawk’s eyes to see it. 

“See, this is how I know it’s still you,” says Dean. “One minute you’re a tree and a bird, which is pretty damn freaky, Sam, let me tell you, even to those of us who’ve had time to get used to it, and the next minute you’re trying to give me lifestyle counseling.”

It’s always been uphill work, trying to get Dean to see something different than the world as a wasteland with Sam in it. But Sam’s giving it one more try. He’s had time to think, too, after all. Dean’s not the only one who’s had time. Sam’s thoughts are slow and tangled in roots, quick and hot with blood, but he’s putting them together now.

“I — this isn’t enough, Dean,” he says. “It’s too long in between. It’s too far apart. One way or another, you’re losing me. I can’t keep coming back. This is you losing me. I want out. Let me go, Dean. This isn’t me leaving you. This is me coming with you.”

“And that’s you getting killed,” says Dean. “You know that, don’t you? So I break you out of this – and yeah, I can – I break you out and I throw those goddamn apples in the goddamn trash and we go to Oz or fairyland or what the fuck ever, and we find Charlie in Narnia. Or Charlie, the next generation. And then you get your head blown off like the Tin Man and we’re back at the fucking beginning. I’m back to cutting your throat and saying a spell. No thanks.”

“It’s my life, Dean,” says Sam. Though he knows Dean has never believed that. “It’s my life and I want to live it. You’re killing me, over and over. You see that, don’t you? Because it’s gotten pretty damn literal.”

It hurts, actually, the thought of losing what he’s had, Dean leaning back against bark and joking about gin. Dean eating the apples so Sam doesn’t have to decide, so he doesn’t have to choose not to bring him back. For a moment Sam wants Dean to say no. He wants Dean to say it’s impossible, to make the decision, to keep him safe. Sam’s always wanted to be safe. But he doesn’t say anything.

Dean walks away a bit. He kicks at the rock, like a moody kid, glowers at the stirred up earth where Sam’s roots go. Then he pulls out his knife. Sam flinches backwards. But Dean isn’t looking at him. He stands for a few long minutes, balancing the hilt in his hand. Then he drives it against the rock and the blade breaks.

“OK,” says Dean. “OK, Sammy. Let’s blow this joint.”

 

Dean looks at Sam trudging beside him. He already looks tired. His hair is dusty. One of his shoelaces is broken. Sam’s going to get blisters. He’s going to get blisters and sunstroke and trip on his shoelace and get himself killed. There’s a hawk screaming in some corner of his mind. Dean’s lived with the hawk long enough, it’s kept him company when the rest of Sam was a thousand miles away, Dean’s under no illusion that the hawk will ever not be there. Any moment Sam’s eyes could flash yellow. But he’s here. In thousand year old sneakers with hair that hasn’t been improved by a small eternity as foliage. He’s here.

Sam probably doesn’t know how right he is, that Dean has also been gone. That Dean only ever came back for those three days, too. Dean hasn’t been human any more than Sam has, all the times in between, all these thousand years, though he’d kept his shape and his voice and leaned on Sam’s trunk and made jokes about pies. But they haven’t quite forgotten how to do this and Sam wants to try again. Sam’s choosing. Dean’s saying yes. That’s something. Maybe for once they can keep their promises.

[](http://s1362.photobucket.com/user/Aethelflaede/media/reversebanging/1triptichearly_Amber1960_either_zps502e742e.jpg.html)

**Author's Note:**

> Several deaths of a major character, but everyone's alive at the end.


End file.
